No visibilty - introduction instrument flying

Weather did not permit to do the trip to Hoogeveen. There was a thick layer of haze at 600 feet and we had a crosswind of 15mph so we decided to practice some landings. First we took of and left the circuit to do an introduction in instrument flying. In a few minutes i totaly lost my bearings... When the instructor guided us back to the airfield we did some circuits at 500ft. I was happy to experience that limited visibility does very strange things to your senses.

First overland solo!

Today I made my first solo trip to another airport and back. That was very,very exciting. The days before I imagined so many things that could go wrong. It was a nice sunny day with good visibility. Wind was 180/15 so a direct crosswind on both runways which made landing a bit tricky. We did three touch and go's on Lelystad before I went on my solo trip and these went OK. Navigating from Lelystad to Teuge is as easy as it can get, but still you can get pretty nervous imagining what would happen if you lost track (I didn't get around to pratice the VOR ;-). Another exciting thing was the turbulance above 'the veluwe', a large body of forest ground where an emergency landing is near to impossible. All in all an exciting lesson and a milestone in my life.

The approach charts above are now, amongst lots of other nice stuff, free downloadable from the AIS Netherlands website.